Foundation Studies

Extract

These words were not spoken by a classicist with an axe to grind, but by a scientist addressing his fellow scientists at the 1961 meeting of the British Association. The reminder was timely. A few weeks later the first of the ‘new wave’ of universities opened its doors to students at Brighton. There is an important period of development ahead. What is disturbing is that in the plans so far announced by the new institutions there should be no apparent provision for the study of antiquity, and in particular of the civilization of Greece and Rome. Yet even if the study of the ancient world for its own sake is considered too unpractical to be acceptable in the universities of the sixties, one may still ask what school of European or social studies can make its work a fully intelligible and fruitful whole if it tends only the branches of the tree and neglects the roots, or what links can be established between diverse disciplines if their common background is ignored. To an extent that no one can yet determine our language, literature, religion, superstitions, and institutions of every kind, even our social attitudes and our very cast of thought, are all profoundly influenced by our inheritance from the past. They will be fully understood only when they are fully illuminated by what we can learn from that past, whether medieval, classical, or even prehistoric. In this sense there is no study more topical or more useful than the study of antiquity; and no humane study, certainly, in which greater advances and more revealing discoveries are waiting to be made.